Valarie Beadle

"Don’t give up. Don’t you quit. Keep walking. Keep trying. There is help and happiness ahead. It will be all right in the end. Trust God..." Jeffrey R Holland

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[Lara Logan @laralogan]

Annelise is still fighting for her life, still has not been moved. Please keep praying. https://t.co/RCL5Ekw8aG

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

Read the Book of Mormon.

Cover to cover.

Pray about it, asking sincerely to know whether it’s true (the final chapter provides specific guidance on this point).

Then tell me whether Latter-day Saints believe in Jesus Christ.

Will you accept that challenge?

[Valarie Beadle @dotnet_Editor]

Amen...

[Kate @kate_p45]

Republican Senators, for the love of God…
STOP POSTING.
You’ve been in the Senate Majority for 15 months. WE THE PEOPLE gave you everything. We gave you the House and Senate so YOU ALL would unite behind President Trump and tram through the entire America First agenda, confirm every nominee, and crush radical Democrat obstruction.
Instead, because YOU chose John Thune as Senate Leader, everything is stalled, watered down, and sabotaged.
We don’t need more tweets about what “needs to happen.”
You have the power. Use it. Pass the agenda.
Confirm the nominees.
Stop the radicals.
STOP POSTING AND ACT.
The American people are watching.

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

10 years. 10 years. I’ve listened to every Dem & never Trump pundit call Trump, Elon and anyone else who voted Republican a Nazi. And now they line up behind Platner, with an actual Nazi tattoo. Unbelievable.

[FeelGoodTales @feelgoodtale]

When young people come into some money, they typically might use it for toys or video games or phones. But third-grader Wyatt Erber had a different plan after winning a thousand dollars. Now, the first thing you’re probably wondering is how in the world did a third-grader win a thousand bucks.
The 8-year-old entered a scavenger hunt in Edwardsville that was sponsored by a local bank, and he won the grand prize. But he really only entered the scavenger hunt for one reason: To help out his neighbor, 2-year-old Cara.
Cara’s mom, Trisha Keilty, had recently learned that her little daughter had leukemia. So young Wyatt wanted to win the prize to help his tiny neighbor out. He very much understood that leukemia was a bad thing, and he wanted Cara’s mom to use that money he won to take care of the problem.
Says Cara’s mom: “I knew he was wanting to do it for Cara, which is the sweetest thing ever. But an 8-year-old giving adults money? I tried to protest to his mom. Then she told me he asked how much chemo this would buy Cara. He gets it.”
Because of Wyatt’s incredible generosity to Cara and her family, a local charity matched his gift to them. When a man in Canada found out about the young boy’s deed, he sent him $100. And Wyatt’s mother could not be any prouder of her young son.
Says his mom, Noelle: “He’s always been a very sweet boy. I’m very lucky to call him my son.”

Photo courtesy: First Clover Leaf Bank

[Kirk Rollins @nicoraytruth]

Whenever you feel down, watch this clip.

[Valarie Beadle @dotnet_Editor]

All 20 (I'm officially old 🤣🤣🤣)

[Sofia @Sofia50020Sofia]

I got 8 points,you?

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

“And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation⁠; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall.”

The Book of Mormon, Helaman 5:12

[Ann Vandersteel™️ Renner for Governor of Florida @annvandersteel]

This is evil.

A two year old baby girl is fighting to live.

Her parents want her transferred.
Texas Children’s Hospital says no.

Why?

Release Annelise Camp.

Let her parents fight for their child.
Let another medical team try.
Let this baby live.

She is not yours.

#ReleaseAnnelise #LetHerLive

[Jackson2244 @PatriotWoman22]

Why hasn't the GOP gotten behind her??

@ChairmanGruters

[🇺🇸 American Trucker Paul 🇺🇸 @4MillDriver1996]

Repost to help

[Dr. Kat Lindley @DrKatLindley]

"Families must have the right to give their child every chance to fight back and recover. That is precisely why Texas passed its Right to Try law, so that parents facing the most devastating moments of their lives are not also being pushed toward irreversible decisions by institutional timelines that may have nothing to do with their child's prognosis.“

Texas's Right to Try law (codified in Chapter 489 of the Texas Health and Safety Code) allows terminally ill patients to access investigational drugs, biological products, and medical devices that have completed Phase I clinical trials but have not yet received full FDA approval for general use.

[Valarie Beadle @dotnet_Editor]

It's about time!

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🚨🇺🇸🇮🇷 Washington found its counter to Iran's $24 billion demand: spend the frozen money on the countries Iran keeps hitting

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has ordered officials to tally the damage Gulf partners have suffered from Iranian attacks and price out repair and recovery costs, as the administration weighs using frozen Iranian assets to compensate for past and future damage linked to Tehran.

Think through what that does.

Iran says the entire deal hinges on getting its $24 billion back.

Treasury's answer is to start metering that pot out to Kuwait and Bahrain, so every missile Tehran fires at its neighbors now drains its own recoverable fortune.

The airport terminal, the casualties, the repairs, it all gets billed to Iran's account.

Source: Reuters

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Ray Lambert had already been shot twice and blown up once before he ever set foot on Omaha Beach.

He had survived the invasion of North Africa in 1943. Then Sicily. Each time he had been wounded. Each time he had gone back. By June 6th, 1944, the 23-year-old Staff Sergeant and head medic of the 16th Infantry Regiment's 2nd Battalion was on his third invasion in two years. He had already won a Silver Star for running through German lines in North Africa to drag wounded men out.

He was not supposed to survive a third one.

Lambert landed in the first wave at Omaha Beach. Of the 31 men in his landing craft, only 7 survived the day. The other 24 were killed before they even reached the sand.

He started working immediately.

The first bullet hit his right arm and shattered the bone. He kept going. A second round tore through his right elbow as he was pulling a wounded soldier through the surf. He kept going. Something hit his leg and opened it down to the bone. He put a tourniquet on himself, injected himself with morphine from his own kit, and kept going.

He found a slab of concrete on the beach that offered a few inches of cover. He set up a treatment zone behind it, dragging men out of the water and working on them one by one under constant fire. That piece of concrete is still there today. People who visit Omaha Beach call it Ray's Rock.

Then a loose landing craft ramp swung loose in the surf and slammed into him. It broke his back.

He kept going.

Lambert lost count of how many men he treated. The official record credits him with saving at least 15 lives that morning. Other accounts say closer to two dozen. He worked until his body physically stopped, collapsing unconscious at the edge of the surf, bleeding from multiple wounds, his back broken, still in the water.

A doctor spotted him. A landing craft pulled him out.

Here is the part that does not feel real.

Lambert's brother, Euel, had also been wounded at Normandy that day. The two brothers were loaded onto the same evacuation landing craft. They were placed in the same wheeled ambulance. They were taken to the same tent hospital in England. They were brought into the same operating room at the same time.

Lambert spent almost a full year recovering before he could walk properly again.

He went home. He lived quietly for decades, rarely talking about what happened. In 2019, at the age of 98, he went back to Normandy and stood on the beach again. He published a memoir called Every Man a Hero. It became a New York Times bestseller.

In 2021, Ray Lambert died peacefully at home. He was 100 years old.

He had three invasions, four serious wounds, a broken back, a Silver Star, multiple Bronze Stars, multiple Purple Hearts, and two dozen men who came home because he refused to stop moving on the worst morning in American military history.

Today is June 6th.

Remember him.

[Valarie Beadle @dotnet_Editor]

Yes!

[Luna Jones🇺🇸 @Luna_Jones79]

Raise your hand if you want!🙋‍♀️

[MAGA Voice @MAGAVoice]

BREAKING: Elon Musk just told his 240 MILLIONS Followers that the only way to Save Democracy is to pass the Save America Act

“The only way to save democracy in America”

I ABSOLUTELY AGREE 💯

[Valarie Beadle @dotnet_Editor]

Me too #LDSAreChristian

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

My church membership is inextricably intertwined with my Christianity, as it is for 17 million other Latter-day Saints

Regardless of what the Pentagon thinks

[Mary Talley Bowden MD @MaryBowdenMD]

The largest children’s hospital in the world - backed by the best legal team money can buy - is fighting tooth and nail against a family’s right to determine the medical care of their child.

If you can, please donate to help the family cover mounting legal and medical expenses.

https://t.co/e28aD2pWg2

[Lara Logan @laralogan]

JD Vance. Pass the Save America Act before it is too late…